1. Field
The present disclosure relates to performing storage operations and, in particular, systems and methods for backing up data from computing devices located outside an enterprise network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computers have become an integral part of business operations such that many banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms, financial service providers, and a variety of other businesses rely on computer networks to store, manipulate, and display information that is constantly subject to change. Oftentimes, the success or failure of an important transaction may turn on the availability of information that is both accurate and current. Accordingly, businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks.
Moreover, an increasing number of people and businesses are turning to laptops and other portable computing devices to access and manipulate business data. The portability of these computing devices enables individuals to work from home and other remote locations, such as hotels, airports or public restaurants. Oftentimes, such users back up their data to an external device, such as a portable hard drive, a thumb drive, or the like. Some service providers further provide space for online storage of data.
However, attempting to back up data to the individual's corporate network can pose several problems in that enterprise network firewalls or the firewalls at remote network access points can limit communication and/or the set of protocol available to or from the respective networks. Moreover, it can be undesirable to open ports on the enterprise network firewalls to expose identification information, such as internet protocol (IP) addresses, of internal devices to outside the enterprise network. In addition, the portable computing devices can have constantly changing IP addresses that make it difficult to establish connections requested by backup servers, such as an enterprise backup server within the corporate or enterprise network.